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This essay, based on a talk given at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, defends the idea of the party by setting out the conditions that make it necessary. Rather than imagining a national, mass-electoral party, it envisions a solidary, militant, international organization. Against left realists who claim that the party is an outmoded or "fully saturated" political form and that we are relegated to momentary acts of resistance or small reforms that leave the capitalist system intact, our conditions push us to rethink and renew that form of political organization through which communists think collectively about political power, act together in order to generate it, and inspire one another to use it for the collective determination of the world we produce in common. Capitalism pushes us apart. Left politics, instead of emphasizing difference, should assert and build commonality. The party is a form for this assertion.
Jodi Dean (Fri,) studied this question.